Retrospective2005–2011This Is Pop · NYC

Game Design Retrospective

A six-year run at Manhattan interactive and gaming agency, This is Pop, making web games and interactives for some of the loudest brands on television.

Role: Art Direction · Interaction Design
Era: The Flash Years
Clients: Adult Swim · History · TCM

Before mobile ate everything, Flash ate the web. The late-2000s browser-game era had its own rules: 800×600 viewports, vector art that had to load in seconds, and a tone — particularly on the cable-network side — that ran from cheerfully irreverent to borderline reckless. This Is Pop was a New York agency that thrived in that environment, building branded interactive work for clients that wanted something with more personality than a banner ad.

I joined in 2005 and stayed six years, working as Art Director and Interaction Designer across a run of projects for Adult Swim, History Channel, and Turner Classic Movies. Looking back from 2026, this is some of my favorite work I've ever made; both because of the projects themselves and because of the people I got to make them with. The art is period-appropriate in resolution; the craft, I think, holds up.

What follows is a curated walk through the work, grouped by client.

Client 01 / Four Games

The Adult Swim Run

Four games over roughly four years, each one a completely different visual world. Adult Swim Games was, in that era, one of the few clients on television willing to green-light ideas that other networks would have killed in the first meeting. The relationship gave us, and me specifically, room to push art direction in directions a more conservative client never would have allowed.

2007–2008Art DirectionInteraction Design

Character art by an outside illustration studio. Character animation by Joon Choi. Design support by Will Hall. Writing by Chris Lamb. CD: Vincent Lacava.

BibleFight

A 2D fighting game pitched by Adult Swim and built out at Pop, in which Old and New Testament heavyweights — Eve, Noah, Moses, Mary, Satan, and Jesus among them — settle their differences in tournament-style combat.

The art direction leaned into illuminated-manuscript vernacular: gilded blackletter type, aged parchment textures, illustrated character portraits in arched niches, and a brass-knuckles-and-rosary cover treatment that told you exactly what kind of game you were about to play.

It found a large audience and, as I recall, picked up a Webby for its trouble.

2007 · 2009Art DirectionAnimationInteraction Design

Character art & animation by Joon Choi, who is so good.

The Poledance Games

A two-game arc, and one where I got to play. The premise — a Guitar Hero parody where players matched directional inputs to time pole-dance routines — generated some predictable pushback over its resemblance to its inspiration, and the sequel was renamed accordingly. (It's a game about stripping. We weren't expecting medals.)

What made the pair worth doing was watching the art direction evolve between the two installments.

Poledance Hero

2007 · The original

Poledance Party 2

2009 · The sequel, rebranded

The sequel got more art-direction budget and used it. Multiple stage environments — a leopard-print/gold club room, a candy-pink boudoir set, an LED-panel rainbow stage — each with its own lighting treatment, framed by a "LIVE GIRLS" marquee chrome that wrapped the playfield like a midcentury theater sign. The dancer roster expanded, and each got a deadpan trading-card profile (Candy, age 18?, 34C, loves sweets, Atlantic City NJ) that committed fully to the bit.

2010–2011Art DirectionInteraction Design

Game design & animation by Will Hall.

Yeti Sasquatch Annihilation

A tower-defense-adjacent game in which players, cast as Sasquatches defending their tree from a Yeti invasion, escalate from pistols through automatic rifles, RPGs, and — eventually, if the economy permits — an Orbital Laser.

The art direction sat somewhere between Saturday-morning cartoon and grindhouse action poster, with a propaganda-card framing device that opened the game on the line The freedom of the Sasquatch will be defended.

The weapons-shop UI is, in retrospect, one of the cleaner pieces of systems-driven interaction design in the set — a grid of armament cards with stat readouts, escalating prices, and a satisfying tier of unlock states. The whole thing committed to its absurd premise without ever winking, which is the only way that kind of comedy works.

Client 02 / One Game

Turf Wars

Branded fighting game tied to History's Jurassic Fight Club series. Where the Adult Swim work was hand-illustrated and tonally loose, this one was a tighter assignment: extend a TV show's brand into a playable artifact, in the show's visual language.

2008Art DirectionInteraction Design

For History Channel, tied to Jurassic Fight Club.

Photoreal dinosaurs in moss-strewn arenas.

The visual language was distressed grunge type, blood-spatter UI textures, chained selector frames, and a Mortal Kombat-style "ROUND 1" title card over silhouetted forest. The work was straightforward; the art held its own. Sometimes a project is just a thing you made that looked good and shipped.

Client 03 / Editorial System

TCM Confidential

The earliest project in this set, and structurally the one furthest from a game. A fictional midcentury celebrity tabloid, designed as a series of promotional units for Turner Classic Movies' Summer Under the Stars and 31 Days of Oscar.

2006Art DirectionDesign

For Turner Classic Movies. Design support by Will Hall.

The gag was the wayfinding.

Each issue of Confidential was themed to a featured star — Angela Lansbury, John Wayne, Audrey Hepburn, Bela Lugosi, Rita Hayworth, Sidney Poitier — and showtimes ran as tabloid headlines. We've Roped Him In! meant John Wayne's McLintock! at 8 PM. Hook On To This! Angry Dockworker Tries to Impale His Boss was Sidney Poitier in Edge of the City at 10.

Full tabloid view featuring Sidney Poitier

The 25¢ corner price tag, the volume numbers, the Daily Digest (Today's Featurettes sidebar, the period-correct fake ads (a life-size Frankenstein pin-up, an $7.95 astronaut space suit, money-back guaranteed)), every element committed to the bit. The reader would read the paper to find out what was on tonight.

— The People

The room was good.

A retrospective like this risks reading like a one-person show, and that would be wrong. The work above belongs to a group, and a few names show up enough that they deserve calling out: Joon Choi, who carried character art and animation across much of the Adult Swim run, and most of the Cartoon Network stuff (not shown here); Will Hall, who was a creative partner on BibleFight, Yeti Sasquatch Annihilation, and the TCM Confidential work; and Vincent Lacava, who ran the agency creatively and was the reason any of this was possible. Plus the broader rotation of illustrators, developers, and producers — in-house and contract — who actually shipped the pixels. If you worked at Pop in those years and you're reading this: the room was good.

— Reflection

What stuck.

Some lessons from that era still show up in how I work now. Committing fully to a tonal premise — manuscript vernacular for BibleFight, tabloid editorial for TCM Confidential, propaganda-card camp for Yeti — has aged better than I would have guessed. So has the discipline of designing inside hard constraints (file size, viewport, frame rate) — Flash forced a kind of compression on every decision that I still find useful. Mostly, looking back, I notice that the projects I'm proudest of are the ones where the brief had room for craft and the team had room to play. That's not a Flash-era observation. That's just true.